Africa in the Western Media

by

Rod Chavis

[Copyright 1998, Rod Chavis, All Rights Reserved. This work may be
cited, for non-profit educational use only, by crediting the author and
the exact URL of this document.]

The purpose of this paper is to cite and address, within the time frame
allocated and to the extent it can be done, some evidences of a modus operandi
Western Media organizations employ to specifically dump negative news materials
and information when reporting, communicating, or disseminating anything
concerning Africa. The lifeways of approximately 700 million peoples in
fifty-four countries representing, for non-Africans, unimaginable
multicultural, polyethnic, polyreligious, multipolitical, and megaeconomic
groups are perpetually denigrated. Africa's incalculable natural wealth, which
is barely available to its indigenous populations, and her ecosystem, are
endangered by insatiable Western consumption. This item goes unnoticed or is
ignored by consumers in the metropoles of Europe, Japan, and North America-the
U.S. consumes about 60% of the world's resources but has only a fraction (4.1
%) of the world's population. With the stroke of a journalist's pen, the
African, her continent, and her descendants are pejoratively reduced to
nothing: a bastion of disease, savagery, animism, pestilence, war, famine,
despotism, primitivism, poverty, and ubiquitous images of children, flies in
their food and faces, their stomachs distended. These "universal" but
powerfully subliminal message units, beamed at global television audiences,
connote something not good, perennially problematic unworthiness,
deplorability, black, foreboding, loathing, sub humanity, etc. On the other
hand, little is said about Africa's strategic importance to so called
industrialized nations; her indispensability and relevance to world
development, global technology, and the wealth of nations, derived from
involuntary African largesse, are not acclaimed in the media. The amorphous
news spin is America has to protect her strategic interests and national
security. Without access to certain raw materials from Africa, Western
industrial capacity would wither much like a "raisin in the sun". Even less
is communicated via the media or anywhere else about the incalculable volume of
African art and crafts that end up in private collections and museums: books,
calendars, and artistic publications, produce minimal income and royalties, if
any, for Africans creating such works of art. Mega profits are gained by
expatriate marketers in royalties, commissions, exhibitions, documentaries,
movies, shows, and other niches in the U.S and world art and craft consumer
market. African unique textile designs are now bootlegged or blatantly copied
by other international economic and globally marketing groups. Sadly, until
the ban on ivory importation, elephant and rhinoceros populations were facing
certain extinction because foreign consumers, mainly in Asia, demanded their
tusks for medicinal purposes and aphrodisiacs. Africans, themselves, see no
value in decimating these animal populations for profit. Yet, those Western
Media moguls, who can find only the negative when Africa is the subject, create
Africa's world image almost entirely to serve their capitalististic greed while
simultaneously denigrating the continent's global image. It is an image again
that is put on Africa by outsiders, primarily Europeans, whose abiding
motivation is profit. That image is as dark as the pervasive fear conjured up
in the their minds. On the other hand, Africa herself projects warmth and
welcome. Even this aspect of the African personality is cinematographic in
that it appeals to the Western tourist's palette through its media: adventure,
safari, natural wonders, big game hunting, and the Sun City like attractions.

This "other" designation works always to the advantage of its creator.
Usually, the "other" is not sufficiently powerful to respond to media
opprobrium because of political, social, economic, and resource deprivation or
disadvantageous alliances with external imperialist, political, and economic
dynamics. An early historian noted, " we flatter ourselves imagining African
peoples as primitive or barbarous prior to European interference in her
affairs, and that it is we who have civilized them. But it is theory that
lacks historical foundation...The Empire of Ghana flourished during Europe's
dark ages; Mali and Nigeria had highly complex civilizations prior to European
military intervention and colonial adventurism in Africa." Africa's
contribution to European and world technological and later capitalistic
development, exacted through infamous treaties and the concordat, especially,
in the final analysis, was of no direct or collateral benefit to the indigenous
owners. Africa's resources, lands, people, and cultures were expropriated.
Miscreant behavior, resulting in not just massive disruption of African
people's cultural norms and values, as well, artificial territorial boundaries
across communal lands, forced European acculturation, etc., were sanctioned by
every institution in the societies (of Europe). The press of those early
Darwinian years and its successor today, continues a tradition: stereotype and
bombast, bias and disdain often are warp and woof of media coverage when Africa
is the subject. Western Media treat the African continent as a malignant
appendage rather than as an integral, systemic part of the earth and all its
natural functions in accordance with universal laws. Its indigenous
populations are depicted as without value. One needs surgical removal while the
other should quietly accept his biblical destiny: the curse of Ham.

Inarguably, much of what is known today, indeed, has its origins and basis in
Africa: Kemet (Egypt), as the precursor in all fields of human activity and the
world's foundation upon which subsequent epistemology is based, magnanimously
passed on its knowledge to the world: a world that would have developed much
slower without the benefit of ancient Kemet's highly developed and organized
dynastic civilizations. Her gifts to the world, intellectually and in all
known spheres of human development, is unequivocal: mathematics, science,
astrology, architecture, medicine, building, the arts, language, metaphysics,
religion, and spirituality.

What do negative media images, conveyed by the Western Media about Africa
communicate? What darkness prevails in the mind of the producer(s)? What
gains for whom derive from journalistic bombast and unmitigated stereotype of a
whole continent? Nouns and adjectives like hut, dark, tribe, King Kong,
tribalism, primitive, nomad, animism, jungle, cannibal, savage, underdeveloped,
third world, developing, etc., are yet pervasive when Africa is the story.
Historically, since at least the issuance of the Papal Bull of 1455, when the
Pope of Rome authorized Spain and Portugal to go out into the world, the one
east and the other west, to bring salvation to the heathens, -and,
coincidentally, set up new territories for the crown-, word of mouth initially
and now sophisticated, globally reaching electronic news organizations,
maintain a negative reportage policy when the subject is Africa. Balance is
rarely evidenced; why? Must a news organization demonstrate objectivity,
responsibility, ethical standards, and fairness? Images of Africa in the
Western Media, many times, are deeply troubling psychologically and
emotionally, especially to those claiming her as primordial heritage, lineage,
and descendancy. They portray a no there there: no culture, no history, no
tradition, and no people, an abyss and negative void. Dark or black connotes
fear, foreboding, and evil. Africa, as a continent, African nations, African
peoples and lands, in the Western Media, and its constituencies, conjure up
Richard Wright's classic Native Son or Ralph Ellison's Invisible
Man; she is the bastardized other, an ectoplasm, subjected to relentless
vitriol and eternal marginalization while her vast resources are ruthlessly
extracted by neocolonialist forces, new world order syndicates, and
interlocking global corporate entities. For example, a recent U.S.
ex-president, is a principal in a mining operation in Zaire, a country the size
of the U.S., West of the Mississippi. Why is Zaire so poor, with all that
wealth underground: copper, diamonds, gold, manganese, cobalt, inter alia.
Modern media, more than religious organizations and the academy, have the
ability to broadcast to every nook and cranny on the planet, instantaneously,
any "news" or image concerning anything and do. Africa is bludgeoned
repeatedly by the press: famine, warlords, coup d'e tat, epidemics, drought,
tribalism, and on and on it goes.

Early inquiry into and pontification about the origin of Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) contraindicated any origin for the disease other
than out of Africa. Subsequent research has rebuffed such unsubstantiated
theory. However, just recently, an article appeared in a local newspaper
citing DNA studies of a man in Zaire who had AIDS in 1959. Is it prudent for
the scientific and medical research community to find someone or thing to blame
AIDS on or would resources better be used to develop public education campaigns
as well as prevention and intervention strategies that together will eliminate
the threat of AIDS to future populations anyplace on the planet? Does the
scourge of AIDS restrict itself to national or international borders or
territories? Does it selectively kill? What do the media gain by spreading
dubious information, information that has not been thoroughly documented or
researched prior to reporters and journalists rushing to meet press deadlines?
Investigative reports by the broadcast and print media have devoted talent and
monetary resources to influencing and shaping world opinion: AIDS came out of
Africa. Did such hype save one life?

Similarly, the recent terrorist bombings in Kenya and Tanzania (August '98),
countries in East Africa, did not receive precise reportage. Headlines
suggested Africa is a country rather than fifty-four sovereign nations. Most
people have no understanding of world geography, let alone specific nations in
Africa. Why does the media not promote understanding in its "objective "
reportage? Conversely, the Oklahoma City bombing (April 1995) was given
infinitesimal reportage; specifics on the people, region, local culture,
lifestyle, and environment were given for viewer consumption repeatedly.
Ostensibly, such detailed coverage was important so as to heighten a sense of
national empathy. Local residents were interviewed to add authenticity of how
real lives were utterly disrupted or destroyed by the heinous crime. How does
the media justify perpetrating disparities, circumvention of objectivity, and
sometimes questionable journalistic and professional ethics in reporting
critical newsworthy African events for domestic and global consumption? Why is
it "ethnicity" in Bosnia or Kosovo and "tribe" in Africa? Why are certain
African cultural groups, residing in "jungles" designated pygmies while
northern, caribou herding Europeans of similar physical stature are referred to
as Laplanders? Why were the Sans People (South Africa) renamed Hottentot? Can
one conclude that negative reportage of events in Africa, compared to other
reporting and spin tactics, by major news organizations, like racism in
America, is systemic? Can the news chroniclers, wire services, media
organizations, and other gatherers of news, find nothing of value to report
when Africa is the subject-and a sound byte at that? The media industry
practice of consistently practicing the opposite is deeply troubling.

Is there a historical precedence for denigrating Africa, the continent that
most anthropologists agree, Lucy, humankind's grandmother, came from some two
million years ago? Does life thrive in light or in darkness? Dark Continent
is an oxymoron of the highest order. As Ralph Ellison questions in his seminal
work, Invisible Man, would Lucy, our African progenitor, and
exponentially great grandmother lament, "when they approach me they see only my
surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed anything and
everything except me". Others gained their knowledge and information about
Africa from Greek stalwarts of history whose histories "often were regarded as
being equal in truth almost to the Bible". Scholars like Ptolemy, Herodotus,
and Pliny the Elder were prodigious in documenting events, peoples, cultures,
and histories of Africans along the northern or Mediterranean rim of the
African continent from the Western Sudan to Egypt: Herodotus, visiting the
region in the 5th century BC, describes his entourage of young men
as being "suddenly surprised and captured by a company of little black, swarthy
(author's sic) dwarfs who took them to their city by a river filled with
crocodiles". Ptolemy the geographer, living in Egypt during Roman times,
meaning Egypt was under foreign domination and not in control of her own
national affairs, suggested southern Africa was connected to Asia by a land
bridge. Through The Travels of John Mandelville, one learns, "the whole
of Africa is Mauritania, and folk of that country be called Moors, still others
have a foot so large it shadoweth the body against the sun; in the southern
parts one finds people with no heads, their eyes be in their shoulders". To
some degree, European knowledge about Africa was only correctly compiled and
presented by a 16th century Moor from Spain (Leo Africanus:
History and Description of Africa). Contextually, in order to justify
subsequent motives as to their business in African lands, critical to his
mission, seeking riches, gold, etc., the European denigrated the African for
psychological purposes as strategy to fulfill Machiavellianism, later
Darwinism, Imperialism, still later the so called white man's burden,
colonialism, and neocolonialism, the final stage of imperialism eruditely
presented by the late Ghanaian President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Europeans, seeking
to expand their national borders by reaching beyond the political, economic,
social, and civil chaos of Europe, insidiously, focused their entire attention
on controlling and raping Africa. In doing so, they effectively knelled
Africa's demise and collateral underdevelopment, which persists today. Media
organizations were present in yesteryears lauding Europe's takeover of a
continent through the infamous Berlin Conference 1884-5; Africa was Balkanized
without any regard for her people, ancestral and communal lands, culture,
lifeways, etc. The media of today is even more powerful and influential. Its
sophisticated approach to creating the African image, shaping and reshaping,
goes largely unchallenged by those directly affected. Often, they do not know
how their image is disseminated to the world.

Driven by greed, the spirit of conquest in distant lands, far from fourteenth
and fifteenth century Europe, early explorers, Portuguese, Dutch, British, and
French navigators, set out to find solutions to domestic economic and political
turmoil through exploitation, systematic usurpation of lands and territories of
indigenous Africans they encountered along the coastal areas of Africa, West
and East. Extension of alien European monarchial rule, papal authority, bogus
treaties, and agreements, as modalities to "legitimize" nation stealing and
their wealth of material resources but a systematic insidious theft of the
posterity of infinite millions of Africans, followed. From that point in
history the fate of Africa and her peoples' fate, then and now, was determined
not in favor of the land, its wealth or the people whose lifeways, cultures,
and futures depended on the richness of those lands.

Africa's image in the Western Media is not a self-portrait. It is not a what
you see is what you get. Because media conditioning shapes, molds, and
monopolizes those images, references to Africa are received sometimes with
disdain and contempt. Even African descendants, who have virtually no
cultural competence, actually contribute to how Africa is projected globally.
Ashamed of their "heritage and historical past" they side with media
characterizations projected through stories, datelines, specials, and nightline
episodes. This attitude, while supremely disturbing, also abets the media-as if
they need assistance-in denigrating Africa. Of course, the Cherokee, Apache,
Lenape, etc., indigenous peoples here in America, encountered the same thing
when their lands were targeted for annexation and foreign domination and
control. Continual portrayals of Africa in a bad light only perpetuates
ignorance in a world much closer in proximity than ever before a media industry
that thrives on the negative.

Africa's negative and contrived image, promoted in the Western Media, pervades
the psyche, pre-empts behaviors, infers worthlessness, disregards African
humanity, and devalues the mind, while it attenuates human spirituality and
connectivity: key ingredients in equitable planetary wealth sharing. Do media
organizations, in the words of Shelly, "have responsibility for their
creations"? What level of journalistic professionalism must be achieved in
order to obtain balanced, objective, and fair reportage on events as they occur
anyplace in Africa? Because the modus operandi is so entrenched, so readily
applicable to news treatment and for putting a local or provincial spin on
news, newsgathering organizations feel no compunction to do anything different
or right. For example, two German doctors working in Kenya conducted a
significant study on Kemron, as a possible cure for AIDS. As mentioned
earlier, the research community was busy campaigning to lay the blame for AIDS
on Africa. AIDS is alive and well. How many advertising dollars were wasted
in that effort: dollars that may have been better put into research activity.

In conclusion, I wonder why the Western Media has devoted a great deal of its
resources and energy toward painting the continent of Africa in a negative
light. The fact of the matter is the continent's mineral resources, strategic
metals, and natural resources are significant factors in the wealth of European
Nations, America, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, top name a few.
Continual denigration of Africa and, by implication, its people there or in the
Diaspora, is a function of white supremacy, plain and simple. Those so affected
by this practice must instigate its demise. Thank you for your attention.